


the harder the rain (the sweeter the sun)

by scrxbble



Category: Not Another D&D Podcast (Podcast)
Genre: Hot Boys Summer, M/M, carl is just a solid dude, featuring i have done these puzzles and had that pirate ship in my beach week room, get ready, hbs no longer belongs to the naddcord exclusively, rainy day, this is actually based in canon everyone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-17
Updated: 2020-08-17
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:00:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25947730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scrxbble/pseuds/scrxbble
Summary: They had plans - drinks, boardwalk, those terrible kitschy nightclubs, clam buckets, bonfires, the beach. None of those plans, however, mattered much to the rain.or, the band of boys is stuck inside. tensions rise.
Relationships: Cormac "Mac" Darkstout/Carl (Not Another D&D Podcast)
Comments: 14
Kudos: 39





	the harder the rain (the sweeter the sun)

**Author's Note:**

> this is mostly for nicki because i said if it rained at work i would write carmac and it rained at work. this is also for the entire naddcord as well as everyone who enjoys hot boys summer and thinks that mac freaking out when carl isn't there is kind of romantic maybe  
> title is hozier's no plan but the real song for this fic is banana pancakes

The forecast hadn’t called for rain at all - it had said sunny, high eighties, maybe a cloud or two all week. But here they were, five figures dripping and petulant, huddled under the porch overhang and squinting out through the sheen of gray at the brightly colored towels that someone had left behind during their mad dash to the porch. 

“Mavrus, dude, are you gonna go get those?” Mac asked irritably, squeezing rain out of his beard. “Those are Carl’s aunt’s towels, man.”

Mavrus shivered, wrapped his robe around himself, didn’t answer for a moment. A raindrop pooled then fell from the sharp end of his horns. “They’re already wet, Mac. It’s fine.”

Two of the others avoided the confrontation - Tred, balefully shaking water out of the pages of his notebook and knocking skinny knees together in the cold, and Hungry Dave, who knew better than to try to convince Mavrus to do something he didn’t want to. Only Carl spoke, putting a warm hand on Mac’s shoulder. “It’s good, dude. I’ll run out and grab ‘em.” He waved, almost cheerful looking, as he trotted down through the drizzle towards the abandoned towels

“He’s so solid,” Hungry Dave said, speaking for all of them. Then he punched Mavrus. “Dude, why’d you make Carl go get those?”

“I’m fucking soaked, dude!” Mavrus protested, heaving open the sliding door and sopping inside. “I’m absolutely fucking soaked, dude.” He toppled himself onto the couch, picked up the remote with a still-dripping hand, and pressed play on the  _ John Wick: Chapter 2 _ title menu that had been left on loop, calling over his shoulder outside, “ _ Soaked _ , HD.”

“Dude, you’re getting water in Carl’s aunt’s couch!” Dave followed him inside, his square shoulders squeezing through the door, and Tred slipped in behind them, muttering something about going upstairs and writing mourning songs in his backup notebook. Mac remained, watching Carl kneel and roll up the towel, squeezing out some of the rain in vain as he started back towards the house. He waved up as he approached, peering through the sliding door before Mac could say anything like  _ sorry _ or  _ thank you _ or  _ you’re the greatest why do we let them get away with this shit _ .

“Should we. . . do something about that?”

The  _ that _ in question was Mavrus, wrapped in vines and rubbing an arm, wincing as he threw up his own spell that shoved Dave back, making the dragonborn stumble over an ottoman. Mac sighed and opened the door just before Dave pulled out another frisbee.

“Dudes! It’s just a little rain, we’re not going to kill each other over it. You’re going to break one of Carl’s aunt’s mom’s glass dolphin statuettes.”

Carl had helped Mavrus untangle, who now glanced at Dave, perturbed, and turned to Mac. “Hey, dude, can we sidebar for a second?”

“Yeah, dude. What the fuck is going on?” he hissed once they were in a corner of the living room, Carl watching them helplessly and Dave still picking himself up from his trip.

“Dude, Dave is being really aggro right now, and I think you should talk to him.”

Dave, glancing over, said to Carl loudly, “Hey, man, sidebar.”

Carl held his hands up. “No way, dude. No sidebars. If you two have an issue, just talk it out, okay?”

The two boys met eyes, one’s chest still heaving, the other’s arms crossed lazily. Mac was too busy being in awe of Carl’s ability to make them actually  _ talk _ \- but then, it was Carl. He was good at that sort of stuff - at a  _ lot _ of stuff.

“Mavrus,” Dave said finally, fiddling with his pooka shells, “it really pissed me off when you wouldn’t dry off before using the couch. That’s disrespectful to the rest of us, who have to share the couch, and to Carl’s aunt and her mom, who own the couch.”

“Dave,” Mavrus said, dripping with rainwater and disdain, “I don’t give a shit.” Turning, he started for the stairs, yelling as he went, “Tred! Sidebar, dude!”

Dave sighed, turned back to them, hands spread in an almost-apology. “I’m gonna make some fried rice for dinner.” He headed into the kitchen, rubbing a calf where it had hit the ottoman, and Mac and Carl were left with a toppled footstool, a dripping trail that showed where Mavrus had been, and the sound of the rain.

They started by cleaning up - Carl got towels while Mac righted the ottoman and a chair that had gotten shoved aside at some point. They soaked up the water and threw the towels, plus the one left out on the beach, in the dryer. They stood in the middle of the living room,  _ John Wick _ still playing behind them.

“What do you guys do around here when it rains?” Mac offered, grinning at Carl’s raised eyebrow, trying to ignore the fresh memory of him quieting their arguing friends, trying to stop himself from staring at his broad shoulders for too long when they shrugged up and down.

“Uh, nap. Drink. Watch a movie or do a puzzle or something.”

“I can’t watch any of the fucking Matrix movies again, dude. Are there puzzles here?”

“Maybe upstairs, you wanna go check the closet?”

Mac shrugged, too, and they took the stairs, barely avoiding Tred as he, now in some sort of fuss, rushed past them in what seemed to be his own Mavrus-level storm-off.

“Dude!” Carl called. “You good?”

Tred shook his head, nodded, shrugged. “Mavrus is pissing me  _ off _ , dude. I’m gonna go clear my head.” He let the front porch door bang behind him and they could see him settle onto the porch swing through the big picture window at the front, pulling one knee up to rest a sharp elbow on.

Carl glanced at Mac, his sleepy dark eyes awake with concern. “Is he-”

“Usually when he gets like this you only need to check on him if he starts playing guitar loudly,” Mac answered.

Carl muttered, “We make a fine clean up crew for  _ notre frѐres _ , don’t we?” His smile cut through his annoyance, though, and Mac couldn’t help but laugh. “C’mon, they should be in our closet.”

They pushed aside shirts, a laundry hamper that Carl had thought to bring, and a large plastic pirate ship that distracted them for more than a few minutes before finding a stack of puzzle boxes, all breaching whales and white beaches and seashell collections in their brightly colored pictures.

“You ready for a long one, Mac?”

Mac grinned again, feeling silly. “Only with you, dude.”

Carl raised an eyebrow, and his cheeks darkened from tiefling crimson to cherry. “Really, man?”

Mac stammered his way through the next sentence. “Yeah, I mean, all the rest of our friends are, like- they’re fucking dicks, sometimes, dude. I mean, you’re not. You’re great. And good at puzzles, I hope,” he finished lamely, and knocked over the mast of the pirate ship as he pulled out a box.

The room felt hotter, despite the pounding of raindrops on the roof above them. Carl smiled, not his usual open grin, something lopsided and sweet. “Yeah, dude.”

“You’re good at puzzles?”

“No, our friends are dicks.” They laughed, and the heat shattered, and they took a couple minutes to switch out their damp clothes for dry ones before heading downstairs with their bounty. Carl paused outside Mavrus’s room, eyebrows drawn, listening for a moment, and Mac was again struck by the look of care on his face as he returned to the stairwell. “Is he okay?” he asked, feeling silly, like he could have gone and listened too, like Carl was doing a good job at being a good friend, that Carl was  _ solid.  _ Which he knew, but it was still sometimes shocking just how solid he was.

“He’s watching the third  _ John Wick  _ movie _. _ ”

“So he’s fine.”

They returned to the living room, cleared a novelty dolphin Nativity scene off of the low coffee table, and sat cross legged in front of it to dump out the puzzle - seashells on a sandy background, five hundred pieces, enough to keep them busy. For a moment, they didn’t talk, just sorted out edge pieces from middle pieces and blue shells from red.

Carl broke the silence from where he was shuffling a corner piece around. “You know, it’s more useful if you actually sort them instead of just rifling through the pile.”

Mac glanced up from where he was searching through the unorganized pieces for edges. “Hey, I don’t tell you that your strategy is wrong, dude.”

“That’s because mine is objectively right,” Carl pointed out, gesturing to neat collections in front of him organized by color, and to prove his point, he already had more than a few connections made.

Mac rolled his eyes, deciding not to admit defeat. “Whatever, dude. I can put pieces together too.”

“So why haven’t you?” Carl said, teasingly, reaching across to snag a single piece from Mac’s pile and attach it expertly to one of his squares he was building. “Sorry, figured I’d borrow that.”

“Do you even need me?” Mac hadn’t meant for it to come out so needy - he’d meant it as a joke - but he realized as he said it that Carl was the one doing most of the puzzle, that Carl was the one who had been deescalating and checking up on their friends and taking care of people, that Carl (and his aunt) was the reason that they were at the beach at all, and he suddenly felt like his Message check-ins and beer contributions were very, very small.

Carl stopped sorting pieces. “Seriously, Mac?” He shook his head, settled back onto his heels. “I need you more than any of these other guys.”

Mac could feel Carl watching him, and he studiously searched for more edge pieces in the box. “C’mon, dude.”

“I’m serious, man. I love them, but you have this way of caring so much that everyone else cares more, too. I mean, c’mon. When I was off in the fucking mist and Mav was ready to just rewatch  _ The Matrix III? _ I swear, if I go missing next year you have to come to Gladeholm and find me, because he’s just gonna use it as an excuse to skip class.”

Emboldened by the ages-old tradition of talking shit about your friends, Mac laughed and lowered his voice. “And Dave was at least trying to help, when he wasn’t feeding pact drakes pocket-browns.”

“Exactly, man!” Carl exclaimed. “What the fuck is a pocket brown?” He returned to the puzzle, shaking his head even as his eyes softened with loving exasperation.

Mac started searching again, pretending not to use Carl’s more useful strategy as he continued, “I love them, but man, Tred was either trying to find breakfast or flirting with that bartender from the Clam Dunk-”

“Speaking of Tred, should one of us check on him?”

Mac glanced up, outside, where Carl was watching Tred sit in the rain and write, inefficiently sheltering his notebook - his backup notebook - from the water. “Nah, I think he’s good. Something about the rain being like the tears that have all dried up in his eyes.”

Carl laughed again, a bright clear sound that seemed to cut through the rain like sunshine. “Sounds like our Tred.”   
“Yeah, that’s our guy.”

Carl cleared his throat, handed Mac a piece that attached to the corner he was holding. “For real, though, man, everyone around you know how much you care, and sometimes you get intense about it but it’s just because you can’t contain how much you care in your tiny little frame, dude.”

“C’mon, shut up, man.”

“No, fuck off, dude.”

Mac shuffled a few pieces around, mostly looking for grainy-textured blue-gray and partly avoiding Carl’s eyes again. “Hey, dude. I’m glad we found you.”

Carl glanced up at him and handed him a piece that had a corner of textured gunmetal blue shell. “I’m glad you found me too, man.”

Mac grinned, attached it to the piece he was building, kept sifting through the pile still in the bottom box. “I’m glad- I’m glad  _ I _ found you.” He blushed as he said it, hoping Carl couldn’t see it under his beard, and hazarded a glance up to find steady,  _ solid _ eyes meeting his.

“Yeah, bro. That’s what I said.”

Mac smiled, and Carl smiled, and they returned to the puzzle, sorting pieces as the rain softened the edges of the world outside and, inside, blurred the lines they hadn’t yet crossed.

**Author's Note:**

> tabs i had open for this fic include the john wick movies wikipedia page, antonyms for tip, and dark red shades.


End file.
